Omegaville
by Tim Krause
Welt am Draht (World on a Wire), Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder Few, if any, film careers come close to the star-crossed wonder and terror that was the life and work of German auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who burst onto the scene in the late 1960s and who blazed, a baleful, maleficent, darkly beautiful comet across the […]
Staged Fright
by Tim Krause
The skies in Martin Scorsese’s new film Shutter Island are one of the most remarkable special effects I’ve ever seen at the cinema: lowering and grey, impenetrably thick, and wholly impassive to human suffering, they’re a perfect doubling, visually and symbolically, of the claustrophobic atmosphere that pervades the film from start to finish.
The Multicultural Empire of Crime
by Matt Lau
In the final sequence of Jacques Audiard’s engrossing crime drama, A Prophet, the attentive viewer will notice a deft choice of soundtrack. The tune is a familiar one, Brecht and Weill’s ubiquitous classic “Mack the Knife,” but the rendition is obscure: a droll country arrangement sung by Jimmie Dale Gilmore (who himself achieved screen immortality as “Smokey” in The Big […]
Film Review: Toward a Nazi Prequel
by Matt Lau
The White Ribbon directed by Michael Haneke Michael Haneke’s latest film, The White Ribbon, is easily his least controversial and most audience-friendly work. It has already earned many honors including the Palm D’Or at Cannes, three European Film Awards, and a Golden Globe for Best Foreign picture. It is also the favorite for the Foreign Film […]
Murder at the Rijksmuseum
by James Hoff
Rembrandt’s J’Accuse (2009) and Nightwatching (2007), directed by Peter Greenaway Peter Greenaway has always been a visually-oriented director. Originally trained as a painter, Greenaway meticulously structures the images in his films, revealing a care and attention to the meaning of visual composition that is almost unheard of in popular cinema. Indeed the compositions of many of his frames […]
The Revolution will be Televised
by Antonia Levy
Revolution is a spectacle, and terror is public performance. That, it seems, is the message of the action-filled The Baader Meinhof Complex by German director Uli Edel. Adapted from journalist Stefan Aust’s book of the same title, the film attempts to tell the “true story” of what later became known as the first generation of the Red Army Faction (RAF) — Germany’s Weather Underground, but with a martyr twist.
Films I Saw This Summer
by Nicole Wallenbrock
Thirst
With all the teen-vampire fanaticism, the foreign art-film take on Dracula might pass you by. However, Swedish filmmaker Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In, and the Korean Park Chan-Wook’s Thirst are original romances where bloodlust is anything but skin deep. Park is best known for his vengeance triology, (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Old Boy, and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance). In these films, characters who are subjected to violence become heroes when they retaliate with elaborate murder schemes. One suffers through gore in his films’ first half, but the conclusive proof of justice is in fact more blood and pain. Eventually, the carnage becomes more delicious than disgusting, for it is all bloodshed in the name of fairness.
Two Contemporary Hells
by TKrause
Hunger, directed by Steve McQueen, and Gomorrah, directed by Matteo Garrone, both at the IFC Center. Hunger and Gomorrah, two films now showing at the IFC Center, offer grim, unsparing views of the human condition – a kind of Platonically perfect “bad vibes” double feature, if you will, a downbeat, unsettling night (or series of nights) at the […]
The State of French Cinema
by Nicole Wallenbrock
French Cinema in 2008, at the César awards. My expectations for the 2008 César awards were high. Since the French make better films, dress better and speak a better language, surely their Academy Awards would be superior. What’s more, I was suffering from cinema depression; a week earlier I had watched the Oscars, grimacing at Hugh Jackman’s song and dance […]
Watching the Watchmen
by TKrause
Zack Snyder’s Watchmen is a curious film: a painstaking translation, from comics to cinema, of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s twelve-issue limited series (and later graphic novel) of 1986 – 87; the latest entry in the overcrowded genre of superhero films; and a monument to geek culture, embodying the obsessive love of detail and trivia, the fanboyish curatorial energy and […]
